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— village November - December 2009
“’ the banks for a year. But
are they grateful?” Dee dee dee. Opening cred-
its. The set looks like the Krypton Factor and
the theme music by Boxpop is Kraftwerk meets
Prime Time. But it’s not Prime Time. And it’s
not Questions and Answers. And it’s not the
Late Late Show, though it could be the Late Late
Show for that little serious bit in the middle when
Ant and Dec have gone back to the Green Room.
And here is our host. No-nonsense Pat Kenny
looks like he has just got off a horse or perhaps
is on unseen wheels, and delves straight into the
audience - not like a current-affairs presenter,
not like John stay-in-one-place Bowman but like
Late Late Pat in a business suit and sober tie. And
now he’s striding across the set. Soon the micro-
phone’s in a wound-up bank victim’s face and
solicitous Pat is asking competent and relaxed,
emotion-free questions. Where Tubridy springs,
bounds, hops into the audience. Kenny looms
and hovers, finds a footing, and probes. The mic
judders and bobs on the end of his wrist, as Pat
Moondances a little distractingly. He gets back
to his desk and fiddles with his pen while being
autocued. On one of the programmes, he even
exited stage left at the end of the programme, in
inept full view of the camera. The body’s a bit
jerky but crucially the brain is good.
Kenny has now done five Frontlines and the
formula is clear. The show deliberately plays to
his considerable strengths. It’s an intoxicating
mix of emotion and dry analysis with Kenny the
crucial conductor, perched awkwardly below
the front row. Although Kenny is uncomfort-
able with the emotional side, this is more than
counterbalanced by his professionalism and the
incandescent rage that the formula systemati-
cally evokes from the audience. He should (and I
suspect will) have Colm McCarthy on frequently.
He works so well with the foaming audience.
His public persona is without emotion and this
provides morsels of delight when Kenny sets
him up to be even more arid than he is himself.
McCarthy actually said “Don’t be emotional” to
an emotional questioner, and then having looked
at him querulously for many seconds on screen
while he let the hysteria overtake him, McCarthy
said, deadpan, “ok, be emotional”. McCarthy is
sharp. When a questioner asked how long we
could stave off NAMA if we made proper ty devel-
opers pay the full price, McCarthy’s face length-
ened and he muttered, “about an hour and a half
- most of them are bust”. McCarthy is beguiling
but the quality of the panellists is generally
outstanding: Eamon Dunphy, Fintan O’Toole,
Shane Ross. Sometimes we get glimpses of the
humourless self-obsessed, pushy Pat, as when
it is suggested he may earn millions he reacts
at gratuitous privilege-abusing length: “it’s a
hell of a lot more than I’ll make this week , this
month, this year”. He seems also to be uncon-
trollably rightist, at least at the margins. It is
evident he is no fan of the (bloated?) public sec-
tor, he is unimpressed by some of the (eccentric?)
long-termist policies of the Greens. In the pro-
gramme on the public sector, he produced a Pie
Chart showing how Government spends money
(health, education and social welfare mostly).
Pat sets up Colm to repeat that we’re spending
€ million weekly more than we earn. Pat is
an intelligent man and he is driven to frustra-
tion with some of these people: “What’s that [the
pie chart) telling you?” he demands, before he
finally notes definitively - as a man of the world
- that there’ll be cuts “one way or t’other”. It’s so
obvious that he need not go beyond the collo-
quial, you see. “t’other”. On the other hand in
the entire programme - indeed in the whole
series so far - Kenny never said anything that
could possibly irritate the private sector.
It is important to acknowledge that Kenny
is a master of eliciting the core information: the
reason banks can say % of applications are
improved is because they don’t let dubious appli-
cations get into the system in the first place; the
reason the Greens will get new teachers is
because demographics will require it anyway;
someone should take a test-case against banks
that lent to unsuitable people. There is no escap-
ing roving Pat. There is nothing in it for the cul-
pable bureaucrat when Pat announces, “let’s hear
from Joe” and shimmies up the aisle. There is
no escape, least of all from the audience anger
that Kenny foments. Any weakness attracts low-
hovering vultures. God Peter McLoone is bor-
ing: point after point unmade. Before he could
answer Pat’s question as to whether his moral
responsibility as a trades union leader had been
diminished by his chairing FÁS during its extrav-
agant period, the herd intervened to declare that
yes it was. McLoone looked devastated.
Most dramatic was the public versus private
sector debate where internecine and spitting
contempt between people who seemed indistin-
guishable, at least in their
selfishness, brought about
a Duffyesque vista that was
bad-natured, selfish and
tribal. One speaker said
it was bloodsport. Emma
O’Brien from Inchicore -
you win the prize for most
emotional performance
in your own advancement
(public sector). One man
from central casting in a
pin stripe with a red fop said he’d taken a fifty
per-cent cut in pay but the public sector were at
his throat suggesting he was well-heeled and ask-
ing how much he was actually paid. He said it was
below €, but this did not impress them.
Before he opened his mouth the next time, some-
one yelled “what does he know?”. There was no
justice. Even Bertie Ahern got a viciously hard
time in footage of past complacency over the
housing boom - it almost makes up for Kenny’s
fetish for property and the propertied down the
broadcast years. Overall, the programme does
not really show humanity at its most attractive
or altruistic. Pat asked the woman who spoke
last on the Crumlin Hospital segment, whose
child has been through untold traumas due to
alleged poor administration in the hospital,
“are you encouraged by anything you’ve heard
tonight?” “No, Pat. I need one bed now”.
Good television it may be. Constructive?
Definitely not.
Frontline’s bloodsport is the ideal
formula for steady Kenny;
and he for it.
m i c h a e l s m i t h i l l u s t r a t i o n p e t e r h a n a n
“It is important to acknowledge
that Kenny is a master of
eliciting the core information”
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village_oct_09.indd 71 27/10/2009 15:40:06
